Affordances and Text-Making Practices in Online Instant Messaging

TLDR

The study frames instant messaging as a social text‑making practice within New Literacy Studies, highlighting its role in diverse literacy activities. The study investigates what drives language and script choice in multilingual instant messaging. Drawing on chat texts, interviews, and logbooks from 19 young people, the author shows that language and writing system choice in IM is guided by perceived affordances and linguistic resources, with seven ecological factors—expressiveness, functions, familiarity, identification, input constraints, speed, and practicality—often co‑occurring.

Abstract

This study examines the factors influencing language and script choice in instant messaging (IM), a form of real-time computer-mediated communication, in a multilingual setting. Grounded in the New Literacy Studies, the study understands IM as a social practice involving texts, encompassing a range of literacy practices, within which a subset called “text-making practices” is highlighted in this article. Drawing on results from an analysis of chat texts, interviews, and logbooks collected from 19 young people, the author suggests that the text-making practices related to language and writing system choice are guided by the perceived affordances of the IM technology and the available linguistic resources. Seven ecological factors influencing these perceptions have been identified: perceived expressiveness of the language, perceived functions of IM , user familiarity with the language, user identification with the language, technical constraints of inputting methods, speed , and perceived practicality of the writing system. The author argues that these factors often co-occur in real use.